Childhood memories.

[rivka]

My family didn't do much in the way of tourism. Vacation always meant the same thing: two or three weeks at a rented cottage in the mountains, preferably near a lake. We'd swim and sail and have cookouts and attend instructive interpretive programs, and we'd hike - the Adirondacks in New York, the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, the White Mountains in New Hampshire.

I loved hiking when I was small. It's funny what I remember about it now: my mother saying look for trolls every time we came to a bridge or stream crossing, learning that don't talk to strangers didn't apply on the trail, finding usually-forbidden foods like candy bars in our lunches, drinking water and lemonade out of clear plastic bottles whose faded labels read sterile water for irrigation. A sunny hillside field beneath a firewatch tower, studded with wild blueberries. Clambering over every boulder we passed, while the grownups went around. My mother calling my brother Sport. "I want to be Sport, too!" "Okay. He can be Sport One and you can be Sport Two."

I went on the short hikes - suitable for little kids. I knew that when I grew up I would go on the big hikes, the ones my father took with my brother and oldest sister, for which they left the house before sunrise so they'd reach the summit and be down below treeline before the inevitable afternoon thunderstorms. And in the meantime, when I complained that I wanted to climb a real mountain my father produced what he called "Mount Severance" (which turned out to really be called Severance Hill), and taught me how to follow the orange paint blazes on the trees to what he obligingly referred to as "the summit." I marked my progress, and knew that someday I would climb the ne plus ultra, Longs Peak in Rocky Mountain National Park, more than 14,000 feet high. My brother climbed it when he was ten, I think, to much fanfare. I could see it from almost any point in the park, and from my vantage point it looked like a family rite of passage.

I had hip surgery the summer I was six. And the summer I was seven. And nine. And ten. My parents scheduled the surgeries each year to fall after our vacation, and although the recoveries were often difficult, by the next year's vacation I was making my way back up to Emerald Lake or wherever the designated kid-sized hike of the day was headed. The summer I was eleven, everything changed.

I had been having some pain. Not during activity, at first, but afterwards - a slow, burning, aching pain in my hip that built over time. At first, understandably, my family was skeptical: I'd spend hours walking around at the library book sale, and then complain that I was in too much pain to help carry books in from the car. I'd have been skeptical too. That summer, I remember my mother coaxing me out on a walk "to get in shape for Colorado". I remember standing in tears, stopped at the corner of Hoffman and Water streets, saying I can't. And my mother, bewildered: "What's wrong? It can't hurt that much. You're just not in shape." But she called my orthopedist, and he took X-rays and reported back that in shape had nothing to do with it. I had developed osteoarthritis in my right hip, and with every step I took little flakes of bone chipped off and embedded themselves in muscle tissue, which thereby became inflamed and sore. Progressive. Not curable.

I still took some shorter hikes, but found myself struggling. My parents bought me a carved aspenwood cane. Mostly, in national parks my mother and I would find ranger-led programs to attend while the rest of the family went hiking, combing the schedule for phrases like 0.5 mile walk and gentle path. Outside the national parks, I spent my vacations lying on the beach or by the pool, reading. I started feeling, in my incipient teenaged angst, that my father the intrepid hiker and I had nothing in common anymore, no way to feel close. I felt, obscurely, that I had failed at being a Wald. (I know, I know. In my defense, I was fourteen.)

But as the years went by, I found other things to do with my father. I found a summer job that allowed me to avoid going on vacation with the family. I found myself using the aspenwood cane more and more - not just for hiking, but every day. And so the rest of the story unfolded. Until about three weeks ago, I thought I'd reconciled myself to never doing anything like hiking again. I thought I was pleased enough with the fact that my hip replacement had left me able to walk.

All of this is a circuitous way of getting around to explaining that my recent forays into hiking, however brief and limited of distance they've been, have been both exhilarating and terrifying. I'm painfully excited about this door that's cracked open in front of me, and yet at the same time I'm holding my breath waiting for it to vanish as quickly as it appeared. I'm afraid to want it too much. In one breath I ask myself if I can hike two miles, could I someday hike five? Seven?, and in the next breath I cringe away from that ache of longing and tell myself not to be ridiculous. It's impossible, except that maybe it isn't. It feels so dangerous to want it. But at the same time, I'm looking up trips like this one and dreaming...

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. Maybe we can try a longer stretch next time?